Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,29

been plotting to coin money with an eye toward paying an army to help him overthrow his brother. He had bragged of how well he would govern England once the Protector was locked up and he himself was in power. Less sinister, but more disturbing to me as a mother, were the stories that emerged about a flirtation with the lady Elizabeth. Seymour had popped into the princess’s room in the morning, bare-legged, and had made as if to pounce on the girl. With the queen assisting, apparently with the notion that this was simply Seymour having his fun, he had held Elizabeth down and cut a black gown of hers he disliked into shreds. Then the queen herself had caught her husband embracing Elizabeth, and the fun had ended. Might he have been engaging in such conduct with my Jane? She was young—but not so young that such behavior by a man was beyond belief.

“There is something I must talk to you about,” I said, half stammering, as I came into Jane’s chamber at Dorset House. “The Admiral. He seems to have been very familiar with the lady Elizabeth while you were both there.”

“Yes, my lady. He was.”

“In what way?”

Jane’s face puckered in puzzlement. “The same way he was with me, I suppose. He would pay her compliments on her music. He liked to dance with her—with me, too. And with the queen, too, of course, before she became great with child and preferred to sit and watch. He never spoke much about what we were reading; I don’t think he cared for it himself. He would go riding with us and the queen quite often. The lady Elizabeth is a good horsewoman, better than me; he always would praise her. Sometimes they would make a game of seeing who could ride the fastest, but it made the queen worry too much, so they stopped.”

“And after you came to live with him again after the queen’s death? Was he familiar with you?”

“No, my lady. Not like the old days. I spent most of my time with his mother, doing needlework and practicing my music when I wasn’t having my lessons. He seemed very busy, much more than he had been when the queen was alive. He was always coming and going. Even when Father stayed there, I hardly saw him. The most I saw of him was when he took me to court for Christmas. I enjoyed that.”

“Jane, I must ask you a delicate question. Did he ever lay his hands upon you?”

“My lady?”

“Like—like a lover might.”

“No, Mother! Nothing like that.” Jane’s expression, half indignant at this insult to the Admiral, half puzzled at my asking such a strange question, was worth a thousand denials.

I let out my breath with relief. “Then I am glad to hear it.”

“Mother, is the Admiral in trouble? Am I the cause of it?”

“You are not the cause of it, but he is in very serious trouble. It has to do with the Protector and things that he has been saying against him.”

“Oh, the Protector,” Jane said offhandedly. “The Admiral hates him.”

11

Jane Dudley

March 1549 to October 1549

With the last of the depositions completed, the king’s council had made the painful choice to bring formal charges of high treason against Thomas Seymour, which he refused to answer, and a bill of attainder had passed both the Lords and the Commons. An ashen-faced Somerset had signed his younger brother’s death warrant, his hand shaking, and on March 20, 1549, the Admiral, debonair as always, walked to the scaffold at Tower Hill.

His brother was not there to see his last moments on earth. He and the duchess had gone with the king to Greenwich, where the duchess had invited my husband and me to stay lest Somerset give way at the last moment and halt the execution. But as we sat down to breakfast on bacon, eggs, and cheese, it was clear the Protector’s mind was not on the delicious-smelling food, not even on the quince marmalade made by his own duchess, who liked to potter around in the kitchen from time to time.

“The fourth Edward had to put his brother to death,” said the Protector. “I wonder if he felt as I do today.”

“The Duke of Clarence was a menace to the king,” said John. He laid an arm upon Somerset’s sleeve. For the occasion, the Protector had dressed in black. “And your brother was a menace to our king—and to you. You heard what he